I687, London:
The tall guy was sitting under a tree in a park; sipping tea and thinking about the inflation and the grocery bill. Suddenly something dropped on his head.
-Ouch!!
He looked upwards and discovered an apple tree and looked downwards and discovered gravity (figuratively speaking of course!).He published his findings in “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica”
2008, Kolkata:
I was sitting in my friend’s house, sipping tea and talking about joining date of TCS and music of “Rock On!!” and listing to Debankar’s guiter .Suddenly something dropped on my head. I looked up and discovered a disk of “Munnabhai MBBS ”. I looked down on the disk and discovered copyright.
Actually I didn’t discovered copyright; I discovered the disk was original. Now that’s a bit complicated, what the hell original disk means? Most of us go through life without seeing a single original disk of anything i.e. movie, software etc. And here in my hand was an original piece, written behind “buy original CD or DVD, kill piracy”.
I heard so many times on TV, radio that musicians are requesting people to buy music and save their livelihood. I also saw people saying copyright means my right to copy. I looked at my computer, it was starting up. The OS was pirated Windows XP. The anti-virus was pirated; most of the softwares I use are pirated. Almost all the songs that sit on my machines are copyrighted and haven’t paid anything for them. The movies I have watched till now were all pirated. Where that does leaves me? In fact everywhere I look I see rampant copyright violation. I tried to calculate the damage done to entertainment industry by me. It came to around 500 movies and so around 20000 bucks. I alone cost that much!!! That too without considering the songs or eBooks collections that I pride myself. I didn’t dare to calculate further.
Then something struck me. I never heard any musician or author (of course of modern times) dying of starvation. That obviously doesn’t mean anything. I decided to probe further. An audio CD costs around Rs.100. Which is not very cheap considering it contains around 8-10 songs all of which are not good, whereas one can download it for free. And there is not much difference between qualities. So the choice is between high priced over hyped products and free illegal materials. No prize for guessing the winner.
I remember about a particular incident. It was 19th July 2007, Harry Potter and deathly hallows was to come out 2 days later and I was already reading it in eBook format. When it finally came out I have finished it by then. Now, if I was author it would be terribly distressing to know that my creation wasn’t fetching me anything or will it be? It would also probably mean that people like my writing so much that they are willing to suffer damage to eyesight by staring to computer monitor to read a book!!!
Actually it is very difficult to find a solution. One possible solution could be to lower the prices of original pieces or maybe to make the quality of original pieces better so that copying them damages their quality.
Its no point crying over piracy, otherwise it wasn’t possible to listening songs or watching movie so much. So, keep on doing whatever you do, just be careful to avoid using traceable downloads. CHEERS!!!
